Sunday, October 17, 2010

Deep Thoughts, with ThisIsFiveEighteen. After a few days of near constant barrage of Scooby Doo, I decided to talk about one of my favorite cartoons ever. And finally a video short enough to fit on Youtube.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Dragonball Evolution came on HBO yesterday, and we watched it. And it was bad. I tend to go into film adaptations of favorite media with the mindset that it's something on its own, and anything that hearkens back to the source material is icing on the cake. But I just couldn't here. This is just my immediate reaction. Ugh.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

So I downloaded the demo for the upcoming game Just Cause 2. First impressions are fine. It opens with us being introduced to the ministry of funny accents that is the main character and his contact, who all sound like they’re reading the script word for word, but whatever. I’m then let into a small tutorial zone with all the goodies that I’ll need for the game. You see, this game is all about CHAOS!

Wanton destruction is the weapon of choice for the day. After getting to know the controls, I left the small tutorial spot and was given 30 minutes of demo time to go nuts, and a specific objective of I think it was 4000 CHAOS!

I thought to myself, “4000 CHAOS!? That’ll be easy.” So I began running about the vast landscape, and the graphics don’t disappoint me. One of the interesting features of Just Cause 2 is base jumping and parachuting. It’s a very quick way to get around, and the controls are fairly intuitive. I had much more fun, however, trying to see how epically I could kill myself from 100 foot, headlong drops. The first problem I came across was once I got to a lower altitude, there wasn’t anything to do, and moving is pretty slow. I found myself using dodge rolls to move around like I’m trying to get to Hyrule Castle or something. I finally found a town, and decided to kill some civilians to earn some CHAOS!

Well, killing people doesn’t award you CHAOS!

After a few murders, the cops showed up. I was able to scavenge some ammo off of them and found that destroying cars does earn CHAOS!

The driving controls are fair enough, but the cars slide about way too much, so they’re hard to keep on the straight. I’d think driving 50 mph and hitting a dude on a motorcycle would be pretty chaotic, but I guess not. Blowing up cars only ended up giving me about 10 points of CHAOS!

each, which wasted a bunch of ammo, so I tired of it quickly. I was prompted with instructions to tear down a statue with my grappling hook, but I couldn’t bring it down. At this point, the demo ended. After 30 minutes, I only ended up with about 900 CHAOS!

I’ll admit that about 2 minutes of that was just repeated base jump suicide, but that’s sort of ridiculous. It was alright, I guess. The parachuting aspect is interesting, and I’m sure with some more time, the game would be really good. The post demo trailer showed major cities in a state of CHAOS!

which may have been a bit more informative a demo than this vast barren somewhat middle eastern looking place with too much space between interesting destroyable things. I may rent Just Cause 2 once it comes out, and it could possibly change my mind. CHAOS!